TEXAS, 1984by Martin Cockroft Heat never leaves. It shuts itself in a room upstairs and refuses to open a window. Outside, the oak backs away from life. A child pulls at his jersey. Across the county, tires fuss at gravel. There’s no rain there either. The sky knots every afternoon and yesterday or this weekend thunder empties a neighborhood pool, jostles drying dishes. Lamps blink twice, clock-radios zero, but it won’t rain. Come dark stars wring light from field dust. No one resents it: stars don’t make weather. Every night you have to trick the dog out from under the porch. He comes through a hole in the lattice, stiff and slow. He’s a deaf old son-of-a-bitch, but he’s here, under a moon dragged by the dead limb of a pecan. At the VFW they’ve got a brush pile big as a house they won’t burn. It is a house, godless, condemned, about to go. |